Saving Faith
by Cookie-Stories
Summary: Innocence stripped from both of them right from the start, Clint and Natasha started to try and find their way back, ending up face to face with the bruised soul of the other. Now, when time has torn things down instead of heal, they have to find their way back to each other, and save faith. IN-MOVIE POST-MOVIE Clintasha.
1. Chapter 1: To Kill A Mockingbird

**A/N: this is a post-avenger story(: the first few chapters will be circling around the movie's end, each providing a little backstory that will lead up to an eventual hurt/comfort -family pregnancy fic! yaaaaay. unrealistic story once again! just... stay with me, alright?(: if you really do hate pregnancy fics, then i'll make sure to put up a warning before i get to that so you have time to shield your eyes! hehe.**

**disclaimer: nothing. i own nothing. if i did, i'd make life for the avengers hell from Clintasha's endlessly loud sex at night. i'm joking. i removed mah braces today though! that's some truth!**

**chapter warning: Mention of rape, Tony's mention of hot sex, as well as Disgusting food remains on the floor. lots of insulting. **

* * *

_"She's standing in the heart of darkness  
Saying I know you got a soul even though you're heartless  
How could any woman in their right mind be so blind,  
To find something this safe  
Instead of walking with me she should have walked away." _

_-Walk Away by **The Script**_

_****__Chapter 1: To Kill_ A_ Mockingbird_

He made the largest effort of keeping his limp from the eyes of the others. Eyes of the one Natasha Romanoff.

Less than twenty four hours ago, Clint was fishing out her disadvantages and planning their confrontation down to the worst detail. Less than twenty four hours ago, with plasma blue cradling his mind in its sickeningly sweet scent, he wanted to sweep control from right under her feet and make entry at her largest fear. Losing control.

Thrown into the Red Room and stripped of all authority she only owned at the meagre age of eight, and that meant her body, her feelings and her thoughts, Natasha was lost in between of wanting to be found and wanting back all control. With Clint, it came in both, and it came at the highest cost of needing him as backbone.

He would never rape her like her ex-husband (a Red Room policy) at her weakest. He would never send a room full of lustful, pedophiliac guards onto an orphaned girl simply trying to find her tiny footing on a reality without two guiding, affectionate parents. He wouldn't use forced sex as a punishment, love as a weapon to strip her bare of sense and fight. And what happened now?

She knew that it wasn't his fault. He vowed never to hurt her like that. Six years ago, his mission was to kill her, the seemingly fatal Black Widow. Also, six years ago, he made the call, not about not killing her, but about trusting Natasha. He found her and he found her secrets, and he promised her a chest and its key if she were to allow herself to put her trust in him and let herself be fragile for a minute.

Less than twenty four hours ago, Clint wasn't Clint. Clint was a monster made by Loki and his orbed plaything, wanting to make her bleed slowly and relive her decade-long nightmare of rape. He was the key to her weakness, all three of her past's greatest demons combined into one conclusive fear. He was an obstacle that she stumbled over. Clint was a test, and dear Natasha failed. Well, in her terms.

In Clint's terms, she was more than normal to react like that. Being afraid was normal. She was a living, breathing example of brokenness at its worst. Natasha deserved to feel like that, like a human. Natasha Romanoff was human, and that sounded perfect and sweet as it rolled off his tongue. It felt fitting. However he felt about her being human, though, he still couldn't look her in the eye. He was too guilty.

So, walking down a street with the rest of the Avenger's assemble, Clint just watched as mountains of rubble was pulled from the ground and busy medics triaged the casualties of their fight. Their fight with Loki's army. The knowledge that Clint could have been part of that mechanical march down, peeling the paint off the buildings of his own country, it tore at his conscience. _Loki._A quiet growl rumbled in his throat.

Biting the malleable bullet hard, Clint dragged his collapsible body to follow behind the group. Asphalt was catching up with him quickly, and his stomach was churning uncomfortably, probably because he hadn't eaten since he went under Loki's influence. He wasn't sure the shawarma was going to make it to his stomach before he hurled everything back up again.

Clint believed that he was going collapse from the exhaustion and the crippling pain in his back if the walk to the street side store was going to take any longer. Still, he kept his eyes on Natasha and the flurry of bright red on her head, feeling unnerved yet gratified about the other man beside his partner. The back of his dark button-up shirt and the ruffled form of his longer dark hair was easy to identify. Bruce Banner.

He sighed with a slight pant. At least the hulk was more capable of protecting his partner than one that would use the overbearing knowledge of her weaknesses to pit himself against her. What kind of partner was he to Natasha? The sinful kind that would devour in hunger. Well, in his terms.

Natasha rested most of her weight on the man that, out of fear and lack of control, had almost smashed her bones to dust less than twenty four hours ago. Her partner was lagging behind, certainly consuming himself with twice the guilt a normal person could muster.

He was dark, and it was the little dark and twisty part of him, in which she had only gotten glances of, that intrigued her. Sometimes, Natasha loved how it made the most powerful connection and understanding between them. Others she detested; it always made Clint amplify the feelings he shouldn't, and neglect whatever was right in front of him that mattered most.

She didn't like Oblivious Clint, or Overly Guilty Clint. The man that had saved her from who she had become, that was the Clint that mattered. She wanted her iron knight back, because the iron princess was nothing without her knight.

Natasha threw a quick glance over her shoulder to check on her partner. Shagged, exhausted, completely black and blue on the inside and out. Just like the rubber sole to a decade-old worker's boot. Loki was taking a great toll on Clint, and she knew it.

"Go talk to him, Natasha." whispered Bruce. He nudged her softly with an elbow, noticing her surfacing concern for poor Clint's wellbeing. While Clint was strapped down after their fight on the helicarrier, with fluids drifting through his body through prickly IV needles in the medic's care, Natasha had wondered why there was a special order in Bruce's name for her partner's antidepressants. (He didn't take it, though.)

In true fact, he had been worried too, knowing that the man had once carried a record of residing in mental facilities in his teenage years. Wrapped arms, sponge walls and rehab. Clint's past had the grief-stricken boy try to take his life when he sank deep into depression after his last tether, his brother Barney, left him to fend for himself.

Letting feud and anger go with blood like water, it seemed like the only escape. Bruce understood teenage Clint in some demented way. Except he hadn't had as rough a past as the man, and with Natasha now a new band of restraint for him, he was bound to break faster than her.

"Um-ph." replied Natasha. She got his message, his point. Clint was versatile, a time bomb waiting to explode. Did Bruce think she hadn't read his profile in depth yet?

Actually, the Avengers were the combination of the world's most destroyed people. Yes, that included the infamous, egoistic narcissist, Tony Stark. All lost in reigning in their bloodlust and anger for vengeance of what they'd lost, they grew strong from being weak. So strong that they were brittle, and at the mere tap of the glass, they would shatter.

Bruce and Natasha said nothing more for the rest of the trip to their little shawarma restaurant. Tony talking about multi-flavoured shawarma was enough of a walking ruckus to fill the silence.

_-cookie!-_

With his guarded expression, it had taken Natasha longer than she would have to identify his wounds. Clint was hiding it; he was hiding from her. It pissed her off a little to know about that, and she had almost wanted to throw a plate in his face (Almost, because apparently SHIELD doesn't pay for 'accidentally' broken rip-off china plates.) in her little fit of anger that nobody else really knew about.

Clint had rested one foot on the support of her seat with his body tilted slightly to the left to face her. His whole left side slumped into the wooden backrest of his own, relieving any tension on his right as he swallowed food down thickly. Actually, this was starting to worry Natasha, the kind that would threaten her partner and gun point to go get a clean bill of health before coming back to sidestep her again.

But Clint hated hospitals and doctors (his mom was a paediatric surgeon, and most of his jolly childhood was spent touring the wards with her.) and it was a known fact to his partner. Besides, Clint never failed to give a valid argument that they were better trained in first aid and suturing (And sometimes trauma.) given their profession in mending their partners on the field.

Natasha moved a hand to his knee discreetly, her hurt unrevealed but lingering as she felt Clint tense up upon her touch. She leaned a little closer and hissed his name, a subtle frown gracing her brows when Clint didn't even grunt in courteous acknowledgement.

So she was concerned, in public too, over her stupid partner that wasn't willing to look her in the eye. At least, if Clint wanted to avoid looking at her, he could have done a better job than to read a book upside down. That dark and twisty, unpredictable bastard.

Was he really going to play this game? Because he should know very well that Natasha was up for games. _Really_up. She could play the game for two, too, and if he was that keen on running away, she knew damn well that she would be just as keen on getting him back.

Polishing off the last bit of her chicken wrap and wiping her lips with a paper serviette, Natasha snatched the paperback booklet from Clint's hands and stood up a little too abruptly. It earned her quizzical glares from the rest at the table, as well as a muttered curse when Clint's leg had caught in the chair and it had sent a fatal jolt up his spine.

Clint stared at her for a fraction of a second, then dropped his head again and secretly focused on his breathing. He'd been doing it for what seemed like hours when in fact, it had only been slightly under an hour since the time they sat down in the shop. It kept the nausea at bay.

"I'm afraid Agent Barton and I have to head back now. Fury wants both detailed reports of the day's events on his desk by midnight." Natasha apologised tersely. She didn't really bother to smile when she yanked Clint by his arm and aided him in getting out of the chair.

She wrapped a careful arm around his hip right under his quiver and took the weight off of his right side, while he hung an arm over her shoulder. What a _friendly_gesture, she could almost hear the words being spoken in Tony's pissing voice. His Cheshire grin stood out at the table, commenting about how he was 'so going to tell Pepper about it', then sneak up on them at SHIELD base and hack into the video feed to watch them have some hot, needy, rollicking sex.

It took Clint's steering them into a concrete graffitied wall of a dumping alley for Natasha to lose the urge to smack the back of Tony's hideous acorn-looking head (She liked to think of Tony in the silliest ways possible. Her creativity was not something to be trifled with, Clint realised over a pretty nice length of time.) until he went balding.

Clint had stumbled into the wall and coughed for quite a bit before having his stomach wrenched up in a tight knot. Inhale. Exhale. It wasn't really helping for a fact that standing up, itself, was sending nausea crashing in like a tidal wave. Not long after, he was hurling his dinner up into the corner beside the bin, a sight that made Natasha scurry to his side and soothe out his back.

She rubbed his vested back in circles, chest seizing with each glance she stole of his crumpled face. It twisted in great discomfort. "How are you feeling?" Her hand didn't stop until he attempted to stand erect again, where she simply let it slide off the fairly drenched material.

"Fine." replied Clint curtly. "I'm fine." He kept his face impassive with effort, which was something Clint Barton never did. They were always open towards the other, leaving no space for falsity, and Clint gave himself up as the sentimental guy more often than not.

Another thing Clinton Francis Barton did _not_do, ever in their lasting partnership, was lie. He knew better than to lie to the best in its profession, the one at the standing tall at the pinnacle of deception. Witnessing those two things he never did with Natasha, it made her heart wrench with anger and knot with true hurt.

Natasha swallowed down the bile in her throat, feeling her heart sink to her stomach in the same unity. Clint was just guilty. Clint was just depressed. Clint was just taken from his conscience over three days and had just returned. Clint was still... Clint, and Natasha never blew up with Clint at his worst.

"I can take that. Well, disregarding the fact that you're limping, your whole right side probably needing treatment, your body just rejecting your dinner, the only food you've had in days, and you having just emptied the delightful contents of your stomach right... there! You're fine, Clint. _Of course_you are." Anyone else and she would have jumped on their heads and drilled sense into their skulls.

She said it in such a falsely cheery voice that leaked sarcasm, it would have made him chuckle. Or at the least, smile. Clint, however, set his jaw tighter and ground his teeth. He inhaled deeply and held his breath. "I'm fine. Let's just head back." Natasha just rolled her eyes and towed him back to SHIELD headquarters.

Man, convincing those juvenile trainees that Clint was harmless, well personally, was going to be hard, and she hoped none of them would try to cower in a corner unless her lovely trigger finger itched to give them a reason to do so. Her day was already screwed up enough with magic, monsters, Loki's idiotic blue scepter, an escape from the Hulk, a momentary loss of control, and a probable permanent loss of her best friend whom held her trust.

* * *

**if this gets more reviews, i'll post the next chapter up faster(: if not, i'll still update it of course! once every week or two! depends on the reception(; the awesome blue button reception! in that context, raping a button is a good thing...**


	2. Chapter 2: Downfall

**A/N: i'm back with a dubious chapter 2! it's kind of a filler, a little explanation of Clint's reaction from chapter 1. it doesn't go in cannon with the movie, just saying. this story is 100% unbelievable, even in the world of Avengers, superheroes, magic and everything we were all never trained for. alrighty then, read away!**

**disclaimer: if we make it harder and say "when cows can fly" and, being a zodiac cow, i jump off my bed and do air time, is it counted? **

* * *

_"There's nothing where he used to lie,_

_The conversation has run dry._

_That's what's going on._

_Nothing's fine, I'm torn."_

_-Torn by **Natalie Imbruglia**_

_**Chapter 2: Downfall **_

Clint could hear Loki's voice in his head very clearly, the conversation they had in Stark Tower just before the rest of the team arrived.

_"You did it, Barton." The battered god snickered, eyes wide and shining with approval. "We can both remember that look in poor little Natasha's eyes when you faced off with her. Betrayed. Afraid. Scared, of you." Clint didn't want to hear anymore. A part of Loki in him forbade him, however, the part that was roaming his mind for memories to torture him with for the next three or so minutes._

_"You must feel satisfied, extremely contented, that you were able to evoke such raw emotions from the one stone-hearted Agent Romanoff. Terror, fear, tears she swore she would never shed. You destroyed her, Barton! You make me proud!" The conceited, porcelain-faced man continued in such satisfaction that it sickened Clint to the stomach._

_Glimpses of his own planned attempt to force himself on Natasha flashed through his mind. Clint was a monster, no less. Actions demonic. The smirk on his face the creation of the devil when he saw her blood. Oh, her precious blood, pouring. Pouring from the wounds he inflicted on her because she was just too weak, too human and feeling to control herself._

_Red, the thoughts were all red, with Natasha's screams echoing within the thick walls of his skull. His hands bound her tight, giving her no escape, no control, and she panicked. The more she showed her fear, the more Clint's shrewd grin would evolve. He stopped the illustrations in his head from going any further._

_Fingers numb, they ached for Clint to drop his bow. Loki wasn't going to make a run for it, anyway. However, a large part of Clint wanted to shove an arrow right into his eye socket by hand and see if pixie dust puffed out from the hole. "So close, so very close. Had Natasha- can I call her that? Had Natasha faulted in your fight just a little more, you would have gotten what you wanted, wouldn't you?"_

_"Just... stop." No. Had Natasha faulted in their fight, he would have raped her. He would have roamed her and killed her after she suffered more than enough. Without control, she would have begged to die, and it was nothing near what Clint wanted. He always wanted her to be able to trust without having to look over her shoulder. He always wanted Natasha to talk without holding back, and walk without the fear of tripping. To be in control of how she wanted to walk, talk, trust, love, cry, or smile._

_Losing her, losing Natasha, in fact, would simply mean the end. Clint Barton would come to conclusion, because there wasn't a route, a future, that he knew of that didn't include Natasha, be it romantically or platonically. She was his central, a magnet to stay tethered. They were both so confusingly connected like iron thread, holding them together to pace the other's steps, both so equally lost and defected in this world of theirs._

_Already, Clint knew he was losing her. It was just a bit of zero-gravity acting up._

_Loki barked another string of vicious chuckles and laughs. "Does it affect you, Barton? Does it make your heart shred, watching yourself break her, break the infallible Natasha?" The god sought out the worst of all thoughts, winding through the darkest chambers of his mind and digging out the most terrible scenarios. He was shocked, actually, by the overwhelming darkness and fear in him that Clint had very successfully played down._

_In Clint's head, the snippets he saw made his heart seize with inescapable anguish. His knife drew blood slow, his breath lingering on dear Natasha's cooling skin as she screamed. He was breaking their promise, breaking her trust, but she didn't push him away. How he wished she did, instead of trying to accept him and protect him like she always did. This time, he was dangerous, and she was more than able to tell it apart! Then, blood._

_His hands were full of her blood, the slumped Natasha no longer responding to his disgustingly endearing gestures. He didn't even notice she stopped trying. "When you sink that blade into her skin and draw her blood, when you hear her shriek hammering against your skull, it must leave you feeling exhilarated, Barton! Like a drug, you must want more, until she's dead. Then her head will be your trophy!"_

_Cuts were plastered all over her skin, coupled with harsh bruises and the sore marks of his strong fingers pressing into her arms. Blood covered every inch of Natasha, all the warmth gone from her body and the air flushed from her lungs. "Remember when she entrusted herself to you? She didn't know that her blood had you dying for more, whether she hurt or not. You bloody disgusting creep."_

_Clint saw himself bringing his bloody fingertips to his face, intoxicated with the smell, and taste, of Natasha's blood. Smiling. He was smirking at his fingers, crazed for the copper tasting lifeblood of his partner, and not caring for the fact that Natasha was dead. And mind-controlled Clint didn't give a damn. He didn't know that Clint. That wasn't him!_

_Lips cold and colourless, it scared him. It panicked him. Clint's heart thumped and drummed and pounded brutally against his ribs, threatening to explode from such fibrillation as he watched on. He wanted to tear his eyes away, stop watching each second Natasha grew further and further away from life and reality, from him. But Loki wouldn't let him. The damned god wanted to torment him until he fell in two, and he kept him there, watching himself disregard a dead Natasha and giving full attention to all that red. "Stop..." Clint mumbled, eyes tightly shut with his hands trembling with the weapon. He was a soldier now, a soldier with the courage of none._

_"You're just a burden to her, Barton. Don't you know that? Just deadweight and shackles to her ankles! You're pulling her down, and when you destroy her, you'll drag her down to hell! Both utterly desperate fools!" The venom started to seep into Loki's words, the imagery starting to get far more graphic then he could imagine. Far more vicious and far more devastating._

_Clint had almost heaved a sigh of relief when the disturbing scene of Natasha dying had washed away, but he held his breath. He witnessed a young Natasha getting a lashing out because of an incident in the Mercado Municipal, Sao Paulo. He remembered that, Natasha had told him._

_The marketplace was crowded, and she had gunned down a teenage boy, barely fifteen at that time, right in front of his mother from a rooftop. It was by accident, where her finger was on the trigger when her target disappeared just as she pressed it. Why? She wondered why, why did the bullet miss? She had calculated everything right. The right light, wind speed, humidity, clarity, she had everything perfectly calculated to a 99.9% probability of gunning down the man successfully! 0.1% never posed a problem until that day._

_The high velocity bullet went right through the boy's skull and turned his brain to mash. The mother cried and wailed, but Natasha, heartless at the time, had not cared about such injustice. She did owe his family an answer though, a reason to form closure._

_What she didn't tell Clint was the way they beat her up. Batons, pipes and belts. The Red Room officials had no regard for the unjust death of the child, and instead had left Natasha bruised and pulped and cowering in the corner of a cold, dark detention cell because she had let her target run. Their mission was made known, and she had supposedly sabotaged their ghost identity. They starved her for three days and kept her awake for two whole nights, doing all unspeakable things to her. Loki didn't stop making him watch through such brutal obscenities that made his heart shatter._

_"Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop." Clint repeated, trying to flush out the scene. Instead, it returned even stronger, even worser. His heart cringed and dared itself to shatter. Loki's devious laugh was in the background as he reluctantly listened on to the moving image in his head. Natasha's mutters, Natasha's whimpers. It was her voice, but yet it didn't exactly belong to her. It wasn't the Natasha he knew, stone-walled and strong and mentally unbreakable._

_This, this was different. It was vulnerable. It was crazed. It was needy. The Natasha he saw in that thought was just a train wreck. No, worse than that. She was insane, far more broken than she had ever been, and there was a big question over her sanity. Tears stained her beautiful face, eyes a look of fright. He'd never seen Natasha like that before. Never once._

_Clothing hung over her boney shoulders like rags, oversized for her starved and malnourished frame that had bones jutting out all over. She looked almost fragile, different from the Natasha she was now. One tap, and her bones would tumble. By now, she probably had been through years of sexual, physical, emotional and mental violation. No-one subjected to so much torture could ever hold out forever._

_Natasha was panicked, hurt and despaired and craving for love and affection. She wanted to get away from the men with the batons and belts and pipes. They scared her out of her mind, with the way they only knew how to beat her up, feed her lies, as well as feed her sinister affection with their hands and... The way they laughed at her was disturbing._

_Clint watched on, heart dropping a thousand feet and buried into the earth, as broken Natasha crawled up on all fours to the man he knew had hurt her the most. Anger burned deep in his chest, underneath all the pain and the worry, for that man he hoped had already ended up in a grave. Natasha called him a saviour, an uncle, but Clint begged to differ._

_That man had touched her more than any other, wrapped passionate lies around her head twice as much, and had also broke her in ways Clint could never imagine was humanely possible. Not to mention, the day Clint had collected her for SHIELD, it was a rescue mission from the clutches of that man, and she was bruised, naked and barely able to walk._

_So, Natasha went up to that man and begged for attention. She begged for affection, and she begged for love. She pleaded to be saved from all those scary men. Clint's strong woman at the feet of a man, crazy for company. Natasha was such a stupid girl once, so disoriented, so ill. Yet another secret._

_At that time, shame didn't matter. Shame didn't matter, and modesty didn't take any priority. Wrong wasn't proven wrong and wrong was right. At the time, wrong was the way Natasha let him touch her and feel her the way he shouldn't, all because of the unkept promise to keep her unharmed. To shower her with affection and attention, to save her from the loneliness of her darkness. He hadn't._

_Being able to resort to such means, especially for Natasha, it was a red mark. Clint felt like his knees were about to buckle, because the frailness of the girl he whole-heartedly cared for had damaged him so badly in his chest. His heart could have stopped. It was horrible, horrible, horrible! He wanted it to stop, but Loki kept it playing. He kept her begging until Clint couldn't take it anymore, an arrow snapped into the string and held up in front of his eye._

_"Stop!" He panted, tears of severe desperation threatening to spill. "Stop, stop, stop! Stop playing with my head. Stop getting things into my skull. Just stop it!" His hands were almost trembling again, but an overwhelming power had flushed through his vessels and kept him firm. That was just in case he needed to kill that son of a bitch._

_"Sad, isn't it? Poor Natasha, crawling back to the man that raped her over and over again for years! Though, Barton, you've made her list, and you're going to hurt her again. You're going to get drunk, or you're going to wake from a nightmare, and you're going to try to kill her. You'll want to cut her open, break her ribs and dig out her heart, just to see if her heart is dark, dry and stone._

_"And when she's threatened, she'll crawl back to you, this time, because you're all she's got to love! Your frail partner, kissing your feet in plead!" Loki grinned cunningly, watching Clint's face contort into a look of both horror and concern. "You brainless humans, growing weak from love. The reason she will fall is because she's grown soft, because she met you. Don't you get it? You are her downfall, Barton, and if you stay with her, you can only watch. Within days, you'll want yourself dead!" Loki sneered, hissing the words with his lips curled and his teeth bared._

_"No..." Clint shook his head with a tremble in his voice, trying to deafen out the god from his mind. "No. No, no, no, no! G- G- Get the... Get the hell out of my head!"_

_Loki knew that the man was deeply shaken. His daring words had punched the right buttons in the agent, making everything knot and turn and contort within. It knocked Clint Barton out of focus, his pinpointed accuracy messed up and blurred out by the horrors of himself._

_That was because a part inside of him knew that, after the unfortunate, life-alternating incident with Loki's orbed sceptre, Clint could do it again. If he'd done it once, he could most definitely do it again. He could hurt Natasha again, and another covert part of him knew that loving Natasha meant not hurting her, and if he stayed near her, he would._

_Loki sighed, sensing the nearing presence of his brother. He decided to conclude their session with one last jab in the stomach. "Such desperate creatures, praying for the things that hurt you. When will you humans ever learn? There's nothing to hate, nothing to fear, if you have nothing to love to start with! It took me a war to understand."_

_It made a little sense, kind of, since the god's adopted logic was definitely inverted and out of proper perspective. But Clint had read the god's case, and it was just a mistake of misplaced attention and misplaced truth. He hadn't played the devil until he knew from the lies he'd been fed his whole life. Loki's apparently gassed up perspective was actually an outburst of fact and covert anger for any belonging at all. It was a lesson._

_"If she's willing to sacrifice the world, all of it in the balance to bargain for you to live," Loki continued. The words brought an uneasy frown to crumple the agent's forehead, processing the words right in. "if you're all that she's got to keep herself tethered, it would be a shame, Agent Barton, if you hurt her. But dear Natasha is just a fragile girl, building a bravado to defend her pride and her sanity, against a world made of concrete. She will break once you drop her. There is no way, if you keep her in your hands, that she won't slip."_

_It just meant that he had a decision to make, and that was either to handle Natasha with the care she would punch him in the throat for, or to push her away. Push her hard, push her far, push Natasha away. Lock her out, and keep her from the hurt he was more than capable of inflicting. Was there another choice?_

_"Be wise, Barton. It's a world of barter, and it's a world of gain. A world in it's natural order that sheds blood and halos death." Loki's lips lingered with a hint of a sickening smirk just as the rest of the team arrived. With Natasha coming up to Clint with a hand on his shoulder, his grin grew wider, because Clint Barton couldn't bear to watch her eyes anymore._

Natasha had been verbally ignored by her partner since they started to head back to SHIELD headquarters. Clint had not spoken, sputtered, breathed, hissed, nor whispered a single word to her. The past fifteen minutes, nothing. What the hell was up with Clint and the extremely silent treatment?

Clint would only sigh occasionally, or steal stupid, pathetic glances at her thinking she wouldn't feel it. Of course she would. Natasha and Clint were connected, if not physically intertwined then emotionally, mentally, psychologically. She could even differentiate the paces of his breathing (If he let it on.) and know in an instant if there was a busted rib, just like how he knew each and every defect that existed under her skin. A simple thing like a quick glance was easily felt, like breathing, almost.

But now, in her sleeping quarters, he was facing away from her, and Natasha had taken much effort to get his vest off his torso, only to be horrified by what embedded underneath. Clint had been walking around with glass in his back and terribly long, deeply penetrating gashes that almost revealed his ribs.

She felt around his bones too, gently pressing into his torso, from the back, around the circumference, and to the front, to feel for any tenderness. Clint flinched ever so slightly at her touch once she hit the cracks in his rib. Natasha glared, angered, at him, certain that he'd crashed through a window again. Damn him and his stupidity.

He didn't catch the heat of her concern and shut his eyes from tire, exhausted to the maximum once the adrenaline had burned to the cold and hard ground.

"Fine my ass, idiot." Natasha muttered, tearing away from sleeping-meditating super zen Clint and sauntering around her room for a first aid kit. She wanted Clint back. Her Clint.

* * *

**okay, so this chapter was... meh. chapter 3 will be heated(; and chapter 4 will be more clintasha! **

**i hope you enjoyed this chapter! does it make sense? make you want to kill Loki. i realise i have this thing for writing sadistic, insane cruel character conversations trying to taunt others. hehe. alright, so drop your favorite sentence, anything(: i think i'll update my Purple Heart soon, too!**


End file.
